Verve can do wonderful blends and this is a nice project to use it on. I would offer my own take but I am sure if you dig through Knacki's Verve Tips and Tricks thread you may find it. If not you may find it in his gallery thread. Sometimes you can find some very good advice from him in other threads. I know he has made some very valuable suggestions in mine. For an interesting base exercise you could lay out different grey strokes on the canvas. Cut the canvas texture off, use number 1 brush while pressing shift and play with it a bit.

Verve can do wonderful blends and this is a nice project to use it on. I would offer my own take but I am sure if you dig through Knacki's Verve Tips and Tricks thread you may find it. If not you may find it in his gallery thread. Sometimes you can find some very good advice from him in other threads. I know he has made some very valuable suggestions in mine. For an interesting base exercise you could lay out different grey strokes on the canvas. Cut the canvas texture off, use number 1 brush while pressing shift and play with it a bit.

Fantastic, I'd love to see more from you, of course! Verve is it's own world, allowing for a different kind of blending philosophy, but at the same time you can use more digital-tradition style blending, too. However, once you get into the groove of Verve's nature, it offers something uniquely organic and can go from coarse to very fine, depending on what you do and following your movements.I remember back in the day when I was exploring ArtRage, how your mood would affect how it would behave. Nervousness would prohibit fine blending and make it tedious, but if you relaxed and took it slowly, blends would become smooth and your speed would increase dramatically.In Verve it is kind of similar, but it takes possibilities and feedback to a different level. It feels and acts quite a bit more lively. At the same time this could catapult you out of any hope to do fine work, while the right, relaxed approach could make you lightning fast with high precision and nuance.You learn to work with fluid smudge settings, pen pressure on/off for size and/or opacity, chroma smudge...and most of these settings are right under your left hand's fingertips. Same goes for using brush images, which can increase organic complexity and speed into yet another level. It's just that Verve kind of submits its powers to your will and doesn't offer as much on a higher, macro-like level. It's basically a low-level (machine nature) type instrument.Eventually I will see to it that higher level functionality comes into the mix, making it a bit "easier" to do things people would expect, coming from other digital painters. But I will do my best never to sacrifice the raw access you can have now.